TOPIC:

I have wanted to create an area on the forum to act as a roll for the ABO. I have created a draft version of this on the test site at: http://abwtest.co.uk/forum/abo

By surname, some 13,000 entries have been created. If the recipient can be identified uniquely on the roll (if there is no one else with the same initials, rank and surname), I have created a single post. If there are duplicate names, these have been grouped together and all the men listed within one post.

Here is an example of a grouped post for the several Burgers called G J Venter :

I have noticed a fault in this draft version where I have not grouped similar names correctly and will fix that tomorrow.

Here are three examples of how pages will look in the future once users start to build the biographies of the ABO recipients:
http://abwtest.co.uk/forum/surname-h/29636-henning-jan-adriaan-burger#44737
http://abwtest.co.uk/forum/surname-w/38566-wolmarans-jan-francois-major#53667
http://abwtest.co.uk/forum/surname-v/37873-vermaas-hendrik-cornelius-wilhelmus-commandant

I hope this first attempt at a member-maintained medal roll will be well received and that, over time, the biographies of these men will be created and preserved.

If you have any suggestions for improving the ABO roll, please add them here. I will consider all suggestions before moving the information to the live site in the next few days.
One improvement will be to have a separate list of recipients that is available through the name search option and which contains a link to the page in the forum.
I have also thought about creating unit pages for some of the larger units in the same way as we have for Imperial and Colonial units with a list of the men who served in that Commando/unit.

The way I have created the forum posts is by uploading the data directly to the database. I want to make sure there are no unexpected consequences for this method so any testing you can do on the test site would be much appreciated. You can log onto the test site using the same credentials as the live site.

Hi David, a great initiative but I notice that under 'B' there are no surname entries with Badenhorst which is quite common, is this missing?

Ah, just noticed the sort is the wrong way round

also noticed koekemoer is spelt as koekemder in all instances

Sorry to be a pain but I also noticed that the search does not handle text with spaces too well e.g. 'Van den' and 'van der' only return 'van' and then anything following that, maybe I am doing something wrong?

Hudson,

You are not being a pain. This is just the sort of testing I was looking for so I am very grateful. I will work through the points you have raised.

Starting with the search, if you enclose the search terms in speech marks (ie "Van Der"), the search will differentiate between Van Der and and Van Den.

I will check on the other issues.

Many thanks
David